The White Bird plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
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White Bird’s center stands about 1,610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,430 ft to 3,350 ft, a difference of 1,920 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Dead Point, about 7,340 ft, 15 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Columbia River Basalt Group (basalt, basaltic-andesite), from the Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 6 to 18 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Basalt, basaltic-andesite. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 6 to 18 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Age: Late Triassic to Early Jurassic, 198 to 202 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in White Bird reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of White Bird Creek, the Salmon, the Snake and the Columbia: about 560 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Umatilla.
210 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of White Bird; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
